The Indian Wars and Elizabeth Warren's Problem

In 1964, a film was made of John Howard Griffin's sensational best-seller Black Like Me, in which a white man artificially darkened his skin and went south to see how hard African Americans had it under the system of American apartheid. (Griffin's fellow citizens were so enlightened by his revelations that he and his family had to move to Mexico for a spell to avoid the death threats.) Twenty-two years later, another film called Soul Man was released in which a white man named Mark Watson artificially darkened his skin to profit from the great advantages that accrued to being an African American — specifically, a chance to go to Harvard — because, as we know, it was under Ronald Reagan that Dr. King's dream came truly to fruition. The two films were a measure of how the country thought of itself on the question of race, and a better measure of how utterly dishonest the country had become with itself.

Anyway, that all came back to mind this week as I watched the nothingburger about Elizabeth Warren and her purported Cherokee ancestry become a story we all likely will have to confront for the balance of the campaign, amazing as that may seem to be. (The Boston Herald, banging its little tin drum for all it's worth, today led the paper with a story that said it's "probably too late" for the state's Democrats to abandon Warren over this "scandal." Yes, because, given the alternative, in a race that's still a toss-up, the Democrats should abandon a woman with a huge campaign war chest and a national profile in order to turn to some alderman from Topsfield. Tabloid, please!) To be entirely fair, Cardinal Douthat was remarkably sensible about the whole affair over the weekend.

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This really does seem to be one of those cases in which romantic family myth overtook cold genealogical fact, even though I have yet to meet anyone from Oklahoma who didn't claim some sort of Native American ancestry. It is not all that dissimilar to what happened to Marco Rubio when it was revealed that his parents hadn't fled Cuba to escape Castro, the more romantic alternative, but were merely perfectly acceptable economic refugees. I have no doubt that Rubio heard the folks talking about fleeing Castro. I have no doubt that Warren heard her folks talking about their Native American ancestors. I have no doubt that both of them believed every word of what they've heard.

There are differences, of course. The first is that Rubio made the fact that his parents were political exiles an important part of his campaign biography while, as near as anyone can tell, the only thing Warren did herself as regarding her alleged Native American background was to mention it from time to time, and contribute a recipe to a Cherokee cookbook. The other difference is that Rubio's barbered background never became a "scandal" because the infrastructure is not there to make it one. That is not the case with Warren, and there's more than a little evidence that her campaign is just now coming to realize what's going on.

She has not handled it well. She doesn't seem to recognize the power that trivial nonsense can have in our politics. Last Thursday, in an interview with Chris Matthews, who was persistent, but not in any way hostile, she kept trying to pivot back to the "real issues" in such an ungainly way that she looked not only like a rookie, but also like someone trying to kill mosquitoes with a baseball bat. The other thing she and her campaign doesn't seem to understand is that this is not a story about a fudged resume. This is a story about affirmative action. Red Like Me. Or Squaw Lady.

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The Herald — and the people on whose behalf the newspaper is pursuing its "scandal" — has been very clever in implying that Warren somehow benefitted personally from her having been listed as a minority at the various places at which she has worked. (Douthat does a good job in illustrating that, whatever advantages those institutions may have gained by listing Warren as a minority hire, she never referred to herself that way and, therefore, gained no advantages thereby.) To the readership that the Herald has carefully cultivated in the nearly 30 years since it was sold to an Australian tits-and-bum merchant who later developed a lucrative second career as a phone-hacker, "affirmative action" is a big red flashing light meaning that the brown people — or, in this case, the red people — are coming to steal all your money and take all your jobs, for which they are obviously not qualified:

"No kidding, my uncle was on a road crew in Middlesex County, and he got laid off 'cause they had to hire one of them."

In making affirmative action a barely buried subtext in this story, the people pushing it have found a way to devalue Warren's impeccable academic record while, at the same time, sowing doubts about both her "character" and her abilities as a political candidate. Everybody who reads the Herald knows what an "affirmative action hire" means, nudge-nudge, wink-wink. It does no good for Warren to reply that she just wants to get back to "the real issues," just as it does no good for her to point out that she is as much a Cherokee as Scott ($840K a year) Brown is a suburban Daddy with a truck and a barn coat. There is something grim and nasty at work here that she cannot be too nice to see. And there is something grim and nasty at work here that local Democrats ought to recognize before they start sniping at her, and something national Democrats ought to recognize as a force to be defeated. Yeah, right.

And, just for the record, my own family myth has us tied to Padraic Pearse, the decent poet who made such a terrible general during the Easter Rising in 1916. (Let's take over a huge building in the center of a major city with no lines of communication, no supply lines, and no possible path of retreat! Victory is ours!) I have absolutely no proof of this except what my grandmother, the former shepherd from north Kerry, once said to me about it. "Wisha," she said, "and didn't we all sleep in the same town hall?" I still don't know entirely what that meant, but it's why I never ran for office. There's a scandal in there somewhere, for sure.

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